Cheltenham Paint Festival 2018

This piece ended up on the Muse website.

Up until about a week before the festival, I was going to be painting a photo I’d taken in Japan of a man feeding sparrows out of his hand. But then Muse released their video for Something Human and I knew I had to do a screenshot of that instead.

It was the 1st time that I would be pushing my art into that direction, particularly with more freehand work instead of relying on stencils. But What’s the point in practising art if you’re not going to push yourself, in front of thousands of people, on an 8ft public wall?

The only pre-preparation I did for this was the stencil of the car and the neon sign for the bottom right of the work. I also made a very rudimentary perspective guide out of some rope, a piece of board and a McDonald’s straw, where I hammered the string into the vanishing point and moved the board accordingly to make sure the lines all went in the same direction.

Paints I took down for the event were the higher pressure, higher covering Montana Blacks for the background, and my usual Montana Golds for the main work. Ever handy that most of their colour schemes go from light to dark in a single hue.

A lot of people had some very kind words to say about the piece, especially how flat the surface looked, which might have been down more to luck than judgement. But I’m very happy with how it turned out, and did a sequel piece at Mancunian Spray the weekend of The Dark Side.